


Dear Distant Dearest

by goldinavonlea



Category: Anne with an E (TV)
Genre: Anne and Gilbert's Cross-Canadian Romance, Epistolary, F/M, Love Letters, Post-Season/Series 03, the prose is as purple as you'd expect from Anne Shirley Cuthbert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:41:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29884719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldinavonlea/pseuds/goldinavonlea
Summary: Dear Gilbert,I miss you already.I couldn’t choose one way to start this letter, so I have elected to use them all.
Relationships: Gilbert Blythe/Anne Shirley
Comments: 7
Kudos: 33





	Dear Distant Dearest

**Author's Note:**

> This has existed in almost exactly its present form literally since the finale, and I've been sitting on it thinking 'I'll put it up when I've got a good few chapters done…' but it has been an approximate age and as I had secretly suspected I think I need to motivation of having publicly started in order to keep going. I'm largely putting this up now to motivate me to get real work done on the other story I've been carting about in my heart since S3, which is an S3 rewrite in which the enormous disservice done to Mary is rectified, so please feel free to drop by my tumblr and harangue me about that. No beta we post like we have no impulse control, as is my wont. For now, I offer you this and hope you enjoy!

_Dear Gilbert,_

_I look like my mother._

_Dear Gilbert,_

_Are you familiar with Floriography? A truly delectable term for an even more divine concept._

_Dear Gilbert,_

_I have calculated that if I were to write you a letter a day filling two sides of standard letter paper, with my handwriting the total length of all my words laid out in a single line would span the distance between here and Toronto in just about seventy-seven days._

_Dear Gilbert, Dear Gilbert, Dear Gilbert._

_Dear Gilbert,_

_It has been, roughly, eight hours, twelve minutes, and perhaps thirty-seven seconds. I feel like my mind has spent every moment of that time composing letters to you, and now that I’m here, the page before me, I want to write all of them at once. I wish that there was some way I could convey to you all that I am thinking and feeling without the imposition of chronology or hierarchy on the dizzying sprawl of it all—that I could send you a letter which captured how, in this moment, I want with equal fervour to tell you the tale of how I came to learn that my face is the reflection of my mother’s through the mirror of all these years, and to describe to you the precise degree of irritation with which I have already come to regard the singular corner of untacked carpeting under the door, certainly harbouring ill-wishes towards me and lurking in wait to snag my foot at the least convenient of moments._

_What I suppose I want most to tell you is this: I want to tell you everything. Everything big and small and important and thrilling and dull and mundane and the neither-here-nor-there everyday-ness between all of it, good and bad._

_A bird is nesting in the tree outside my new window._

_The pillowcases here are unforgivably scratchy._

_I am now, for the first time in my life, in possession of an item which once belonged to my parents._

_There is a spider spinning its web in the corner of the room and I cannot stand tomatoes and two days after my fifteenth birthday I dreamt of brushing my finger along your eyelashes and was too mortified to face you for the next three weeks._

_Dear Gilbert,_

_I miss you already._

_I couldn’t choose one way to start this letter, so I have elected to use them all._

_Matthew and Marilla went to visit Mrs Thomas today—the remaining half of the couple I lived with immediately following my parents’ deaths, before Mr Thomas stumbled in front of a carriage, drunk at quarter to eleven in the morning, and died. Then I went to the orphanage. But before that I lived with them, and I was too young to recall much of my time there except—looming large, my first real memory—the glass-fronted cabinet in the living room in which I used to talk to Katie Maurice—looming larger, my first real friend, the girl who lived in my reflection. I wonder if I knew, then, what lay behind the glass? Whether I was compelled to return again and again no matter what punishments I faced to sit in front of that cabinet for hours and hours and hours because somewhere, deep down, I knew._

_Matthew and Marilla found a book, there—The Language of Flowers—and upon further examination discovered this note, penned on the first page:_

_For my Bertha,_

_So you can share your love of the natural world with your pupils,_

_Love always,_

_Walter_

_Walter Shirley, my father. Bertha Shirley, my mother. He drew a portrait of her right at the back, in full colour. She’s holding a flower and she looks like me—just_ exactly _like me, red hair and all. She was a teacher. She loved flowers. He loved her. They loved me._

_Gilbert, though I am blessed now to lead a life filled with love, today has been unparalleled as far as making me truly, deeply aware of how infinite my blessings are._

_How selfish, then, to long for more? But I do and cannot help it. I have no doubt Marilla would have several choice words for me on the perils and impracticality (impracticality in itself most always perilous to Marilla’s mind) of too great a set of aspirations, too strong a bent towards wishes and dreams, but though my love for her is unending I can hardly agree with her: where joy exists, so must longing—that most beloved ache which defines all true sweetness. Here the sweetness: that I have been given in you another person about whom I can care so deeply, and who (oh greatest, most monumental and unimaginable of gifts!) is willing to be so cared for, so treasured, by me._

_Here the ache: you are so very far away._

_I do not mean for a moment to suggest that I resent your departure for Toronto or the dreams of your own which lead you there: to love a free bird so much you decide to cage it is no kind of love at all, and by now I have known love and cages both too well to ever begrudge another the sky. I hope you can understand that it was this sentiment which caused my fumbling that night at the bonfire, and not any lack of feeling on my part. Well, that and the moonshine, but largely the former. I would never wish to be a stumbling block in your life, Gil—I couldn’t stand to hold you back from the future you deserve. So I do not resent U of T, nor would I resent Paris should you find your way to the Sorbonne one day. It is at distance itself that I direct my ire—distance and time. Would that the ground could fold up like a map, that I could simply line up the pages right and the miles between us would vanish and I could step straight into your arms. I shall beg your forgiveness rather than your permission for saying it outright Gil: I liked very much being in your arms. It has been unexpectedly frightening, leaving Avonlea. Having lived so much of my life looking out for myself I hardly expected the relatively small move to Charlottetown, and with so many friends, to rattle me at all, but it transpires that it is much easier to leave behind a cold house than a warm home. I have, I will admit, been very afraid that I should never quite feel at home again anywhere else._

_I don’t feel that way now, though. Now I have held and been held by you, and I am certain that I could feel at home beside you at the very edge of the world. What an adventure that would be, to see the edge of the world! I have envied you terribly your exploits aboard the steamer, all the places and people you’ve seen that test the limits of even my indomitable imagination, but perhaps the edge of the world, wherever we might find such a place, could be our own adventure—somewhere we could go someday. I can’t imagine, having realised over the years that not everyone shares my love and fascination for the wilder, more astonishing and fearsome things the world has to offer, that there are many doctors at the edge of the world, nor teachers come to think on it. Still, surely those few individuals one_ might _find at the edge of the world would be of the most intriguing sort. How might they have come to be there? What mysterious enticements might have lured them, or else dark and menacing spectres of their pasts have chased them far beyond the societies of their births until they found a place from which they could venture no further?_

_I suspect if the edge of the world were to be found (in a symbolic fashion, of course: I am well aware, Gilbert Blythe, that the earth is a sphere and as such does not possess a literal edge), one would find it in Antarctica. Did you know that the Antarctic is the only continent on earth which, so far as we know, possesses absolutely nothing in the way of an indigenous population? I suppose the weather is perhaps not the most conducive to sustaining human life, which can be so distressingly fragile, though can it truly be so much colder than our Canadian winters? Still, I find the idea of it somehow both awe-inspiring and curiously mournful. Every soul who has ever looked upon Antarctica has_ gone _there, has_ arrived _—there is not a person living or dead who is FROM there, as such: it has been entirely new and unfamiliar to every person who has ever seen it. I suppose there might be many places on earth of which that much is true, but an entire continent? A whole vast land that bears no children. It makes me sad._

_There has been great, unspeakable sadness of late, Gilbert. Though I believe wholeheartedly in the power of the written word and consider myself a devotee to the art I have found myself recently faced with horrors entirely beyond my power to convey. Though I have turned both word and thought over endlessly in my mind these last few weeks, though I have composed and summarily discarded more drafts than I could reasonably number I am afraid I am at present unable to put to paper the wrenching, terrible grief I have witnessed, nor the desperate fear I hold in my heart for the safety and happiness of a friend—a kindred spirit—who is dear beyond expression to my soul. You yourself met Ka’-kwet once or twice—her father sold you a hockey stick. She told me once that in her language, the word for family more directly translates to ‘people you are connected to, because you are alike’. We wore our hair the same way and felt the same way about bravery, shared a love for the world around us and a desire to learn about it all that we could. Being tied for first in exam results on the whole of Prince Edward Island I doubt it will have escaped you that I speak of her in past tense. I hope I am wrong to do so, but the unbearable truth is that I do not with any certainty know where she is, or whether she is safe, or if I will ever see her again. Much more than this I can hardly stand to put to paper just now, though I am working on a letter to The Globe which, at some point in the near future, I may request your editorial eye on. I have made the mistake of rushing in before, of making things worst in my attempts to make things better, and it is not an error I intend to repeat. It is essential that I get it right, this time, and if I have learned anything from previous experience it is that far greater efforts may be made through unity and community—through working together with others—than one could hope to achieve alone._

_I am blessed beyond measure not to be alone in the world. Not anymore._

_Speaking of company, my darling new room-mate (and can you believe Diana’s parents have allowed her to attend Queens?? I suspect I have already earned the distaste of our matron with my volume, but she can hardly blame me for expressing my excitement. Diana! My room-mate!!!) has, with utmost diplomacy, suggested that I leave at least a few sheets of paper for the rest of Canada to pen their correspondence on, and that perhaps it would be best not to anger the matron further by keeping the candle lit after lights out on our first night here, and so for now:_

_Dear Gilbert,_

_Goodnight_

**Author's Note:**

> As mentioned at the top I skulk about on tumblr—I'm @goldinavonlea there too, please feel free to drop in and say hi and also be advised that comments feed my soul like burritos and milkshakes and also kick my arse into gear with writing and also are just super nice x


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